After a lean last 3 months of the year in terms of reading books, I’ve begun doing some heavy reading over the past few weeks. I’ve been enjoying reading books on technology companies. So, after completing “Hatching Twitter” and finding myself more than halfway on “The Everything Store” (Amazon), “In The Plex” (Google) was a natural choice.
As I’m reading these books, I seem to repeatedly find the power of the influences of the founders. Here are a few examples –
– Steve Jobs “got” music. He was a die-hard music fan and even dated Bob Dylan’s ex-girlfriend. He ended up disrupting the music industry first as part of the iTunes revolution.
– Jeff Bezos “got” books. He was a voracious reader whose first step in understanding anything was to read a book. Amazon’s first foray was books. His initial attempts at disrupting the music industry failed because he just didn’t understand it. Jobs, on the other hand, never really got his head around books because he didn’t believe in them.
– I haven’t read a great Bill Gates book yet but I’d argue that he was probably best placed to understand the power of Microsoft Office in corporates. I know this is extrapolating a bit but Jobs was a far better designer than he was a corporate citizen, especially in his early avatar, and the Mac has never cracked the corporate market.
– Next, new media. Twitter was founded by 4 very geeky founders – one of whom described it as the place to go when he felt alone. Every one of them “got” that. I’d wager that the best new media/”social” start-ups are probably created by geeky founders who’ve fought a lot of loneliness as they grew up and thus understand the real value of being connected online – Facebook and Tumblr seem to support this thought.
I’m not sure what the Google story is, yet, but I’m looking forward to read that. I realize that I’m really cherry picking here – in that these are still relatively young companies and are outliers by nature. But, nevertheless, I find it interesting how the personalities and influence of their founders has influenced their business success.
A Learning a Day 